When Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Man Utd are so intent on dominating the headlines, it apparently gives free rein to report whatever you want on Liverpool.
There is little point in pretending on Tuesday that the big news is anything other than Sir Jim Ratcliffe somehow making things considerably worse in belatedly trying to explain precisely what he and his big-brained cost-cutting friends have been hoping to achieve for the past year at Manchester United.
Then they went and announced plans to build a new £2billion stadium covered by a circus tent within five years and it became essentially pointless to try and discuss anything else.
But there isn’t much for Mediawatch to go at in either story. A fair amount of what Ratcliffe said was inevitable nonsense and the idea that the actual Manchester United would have gone “bust by Christmas” if they didn’t save £1m by stopping free lunches is obviously preposterous.
The bit where Gary Neville stumped Ratcliffe by pitching an incredibly basic way to avoid cutting the £40,000 annual charity donation to a former players’ association – sending Harry Maguire or Bruno Fernandes to a dinner, selling tickets, doing a raffle and an auction to raise that money instead – which “nobody suggested” in his team of highly-paid expert auditors, was also phenomenally revealing.
At no stage during any of his interviews did Ratcliffe embark on anything close to a ‘furious rant’ (Daily Mirror website), but yeah, nothing much to go at in terms of the actual media coverage.
So thank you to Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold – but mainly the sensationalist online press – for their efforts in taking the sort of thing which happens probably at least once a training session across the country and magnifying it to an absurd degree.
‘Mo Salah has to be separated from Trent Alexander-Arnold in heated moment in Liverpool training ahead of crunch PSG tie’ is how the MailOnline cover this ‘clash’, which involved Salah giving Alexander-Arnold a ‘gentle push’ and the latter ‘clapping his hands while gesturing towards’ the former.
If you listen closely enough, you can hear the wheels on the title bandwagon loosening. Maybe Bruno Fernandes didn’t end Arsenal’s Premier League hopes at all because this is ‘incident’ obviously marks the start of a Liverpool implosion.
The Daily Mirror website call it a ‘tense training ground moment’ instead despite Salah and numerous other teammates smiling pretty much all the way through it; indeed, by the second paragraph the Egyptian was ‘jovial’ and ‘wearing a big grin on his face’, while Ibrahima Konate and Harvey Elliott interfered ‘in a jokey manner’. Sounds ‘tense’.
The Sun call it an ‘apparent spat’, safe in the knowledge no-one will care what they write because it won’t be circulated on Merseyside. It is immediately relegated to ‘a seemingly light-hearted moment’ by the second paragraph but the click has already been collected.
Then there is the Daily Express website, who outright call it an ‘angry’ exchange between the teammates as we are told – fittingly enough through pure speculation – that ‘the disagreement likely stemmed from a competitive training exercise’.
They have absolutely no idea but it doesn’t matter when you have a short clip devoid of any context from which a random grainy screenshot can be captured to pretend Salah and Alexander-Arnold were about to have a scrap.
A cursory look shows a fairly long history of the pair of them doing similar things in an obviously playful way. But even if this is a case of the only other alternative – two human adults having a slight disagreement before quickly getting over themselves – it is difficult to see how this is news.
The Liverpool Echo cleverly wade into the whole thing to entirely defuse it. ‘What really happened with Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold as Liverpool pair spotted after training’ is forgivably clicky for an explainer which basically reduces it all to ‘hijinks between two long-time friends and colleagues’ and ‘light-hearted ribbing’.
It shouldn’t be necessary to have it spelled out, considering it was an open training session and not a single actual reporter beyond online churnalists even made a cursory mention to anything happening between Salah and Alexander-Arnold, but there you go.
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Yet this only means cakes can be both had and eaten:
‘Revealed: The ‘truth’ behind Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold’s training ground confrontation ahead of Liverpool’s pivotal PSG clash’ – MailOnline.
‘Truth behind Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold incident in Liverpool training’ – Daily Mirror website.
‘It turns out the obvious nonsense we reported earlier was obviously nonsense.’ And in a sign of the times, both websites have kept the initial entirely misleading story not only up but prominent on their homepages when in years gone by they would have been deleted in an apologetic haste.
Fair play, by the way, to the Chronicle for their ‘Liverpool training row truth as Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold clash sees Newcastle react’ story; got to build up that pre-Carabao Cup final excitement at some point.
And it’s good of The Sun to bury their clarification halfway down their story while keeping the ‘Moment Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold are pulled apart after apparent spat during Liverpool training’ headline. Genuinely impressive awareness to publish a deliberately deceptive story about Liverpool without the word ‘truth’ anywhere near it.
But of course, there is the other side to all this. The side which sees that clip and instead of trying to manufacture controversy or drama, sees it solely through the prism of positivity. So over to you, Liverpool.com:
‘Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold training ground moment proves Liverpool team mentality’
Christ. Does even their light training ground banter really have to Mean More?
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